WEBVTT Kind: captions; Language: en 00:00:04.001 --> 00:00:09.001 In the heyday of publishing, editors from dozens of thriving publishing houses 00:00:09.001 --> 00:00:14.000 mingled with literary giants over jazz tunes or discussed art with cultural 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:17.000 icons, all while shaping the literary landscape. 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:19.000 Fast forward to today. 00:00:19.001 --> 00:00:23.001 There are five major publishing houses built by endless mergers and acquisitions 00:00:23.001 --> 00:00:26.000 and everyone's chasing the next major blockbuster. 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:31.001 It all leaves us to ask the question, what has conglomeration actually done to 00:00:31.001 --> 00:00:34.001 the publishing industry and most importantly, to books? 00:00:35.001 --> 00:00:36.000 Hi, everyone. 00:00:36.001 --> 00:00:38.001 I'm Chris Freeland and I'm a librarian at the Internet Archive. 00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:41.000 I want to welcome you to today's book talk. 00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:46.001 In big fiction, author and Emory University professor Dan Sineken explores how 00:00:46.001 --> 00:00:50.001 changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, literary 00:00:50.001 --> 00:00:52.001 form, and what it means to be an author. 00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:57.000 Joining Dan for today's conversation will be Ted Underwood, professor in the 00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:01.001 School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 00:01:02.000 --> 00:01:04.000 As we start up here, I'd like to make sure that you have 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:05.001 grabbed your copy of Big Fiction. 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:07.001 I have mine in print. 00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:09.001 This is a fantastic book. 00:01:09.001 --> 00:01:12.000 It's a great read, really engaging. 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:13.000 It's a great history. 00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:15.001 So I would recommend that you that you grab a copy today. 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:19.001 And so Duncan, who is working behind the scenes here today with Caitlin, thank 00:01:19.001 --> 00:01:22.000 you both, is sharing a link out in chat and we'll be doing 00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:24.000 that throughout today's conversation. 00:01:24.001 --> 00:01:27.001 With that link, you can purchase the book new from the Booksmith, which is our 00:01:27.001 --> 00:01:31.001 San Francisco local bookstore in the historic Kate Ashbury neighborhood or, of 00:01:31.001 --> 00:01:33.001 course, from your own preferred bookshop. 00:01:34.001 --> 00:01:37.001 Before we dive in, let's take care of some logistics. 00:01:38.001 --> 00:01:40.000 Please say hi in the chat. 00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:43.000 We'd love you to introduce yourself and let us know where you're joining in 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:44.001 from for today's conversation. 00:01:45.001 --> 00:01:48.001 Our chat is open for today's discussion. 00:01:48.001 --> 00:01:52.001 Please do keep it relevant and respectful and feel free to drop in 00:01:52.001 --> 00:01:54.000 questions for our panelists. 00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:56.001 Tomorrow, a question that always comes up. 00:01:56.001 --> 00:02:01.000 Yes, we are recording today's session and all participants will receive an email 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:07.000 tomorrow containing a link for the recording for today, as well as 00:02:07.000 --> 00:02:09.000 the transcript of the chat. 00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:14.000 So everything that we're sharing out here, all the heads up, everything that 00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:18.000 you're putting into chat will be preserved and in 00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:19.001 addition to the resources that we're sharing. 00:02:20.000 --> 00:02:23.000 So you'll get that in your email tomorrow. 00:02:23.001 --> 00:02:27.001 And now, as we get started here today, I'd like to welcome Brewster Kale, the 00:02:27.001 --> 00:02:30.001 Internet Archives founder and digital librarian to the screen. 00:02:31.000 --> 00:02:32.000 Over to you, Brewster. 00:02:33.001 --> 00:02:34.000 Thank you. 00:02:34.001 --> 00:02:35.001 Appreciate this. 00:02:35.001 --> 00:02:36.001 And this is completely great. 00:02:37.000 --> 00:02:42.000 Hello from Vancouver, Canada, where we're seeing actually a lot of the small 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:45.001 publishers crushed out of business and not having any mechanism really 00:02:45.001 --> 00:02:52.000 participating in the digital e-book world, much less the booksellers, because 00:02:52.000 --> 00:02:56.001 it's controlled by very few large platforms. Are we going to see it sort of 00:02:56.001 --> 00:03:01.000 Netflix of books where things can be blinched on and off based on licensing deals 00:03:01.000 --> 00:03:04.001 at the end of the month and then the books just go away and they're not allowed 00:03:04.001 --> 00:03:06.000 to be in any library. 00:03:06.001 --> 00:03:11.000 This is the sort of thing that we're seeing within the library world and it's and 00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:17.001 heavily impact. So I'm very excited about this book and this scholarship around 00:03:17.001 --> 00:03:23.000 the effects of what happens when you have only a few large publisher platforms 00:03:23.000 --> 00:03:28.001 controlling what it is we read and what it is we 00:03:28.001 --> 00:03:30.000 know as a society. 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:33.001 So thank you very much for for coming in and speaking 00:03:33.001 --> 00:03:35.001 here at the Internet Archive. 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:36.001 Back to Chris. 00:03:37.001 --> 00:03:38.000 Thanks, Brewster. 00:03:38.001 --> 00:03:40.001 Now I'd like to welcome Dave Hanson to the screen. 00:03:40.001 --> 00:03:44.000 Dave is the executive director of Authors Alliance and Dave's going to help 00:03:44.000 --> 00:03:47.000 provide a little more background for today's conversation 00:03:47.000 --> 00:03:49.000 and and kick things off. 00:03:49.000 --> 00:03:49.001 Over to you, Dave. 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:53.000 Hi, thank you, Chris. 00:03:53.000 --> 00:03:54.000 And thanks, Brewster. 00:03:54.001 --> 00:03:59.001 I'm really happy to be here again today, sponsoring co-sponsoring 00:03:59.001 --> 00:04:01.001 this book talk with Internet Archive. 00:04:03.001 --> 00:04:06.001 And for those of you who haven't joined our book talks before, I'd encourage you 00:04:06.001 --> 00:04:08.001 to go check out some of the recordings. 00:04:08.001 --> 00:04:09.001 They're really good. 00:04:09.001 --> 00:04:13.001 We've done a really interesting series. 00:04:15.000 --> 00:04:19.000 And, you know, I will give you a little background on the history of this one. 00:04:19.001 --> 00:04:24.001 My first encounter with big fiction was actually at a conference. 00:04:24.001 --> 00:04:29.000 I think it was the Association of Writing Professionals and Columbia University 00:04:29.000 --> 00:04:32.001 had a table out and I saw this book sitting on it. 00:04:32.001 --> 00:04:35.000 And I thought, gee, that sounds like the book for me. 00:04:35.001 --> 00:04:42.001 And I started flipping through it and I didn't I really didn't put it down until 00:04:42.001 --> 00:04:47.000 I had to go eat because they were moving the food out. 00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:52.000 It was way better than I thought it was going to be. 00:04:52.000 --> 00:04:53.001 And I thought it was going to be really good. 00:04:54.001 --> 00:04:56.001 So I think we're in for a treat today. 00:04:56.001 --> 00:05:03.000 It really is a book that shows a level 00:05:03.000 --> 00:05:10.000 of homework that Dan did in writing this that kind of blew 00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:14.000 me away in terms of the characters and the people and the mess and the kind of 00:05:14.000 --> 00:05:18.001 sprawling nature of the publishing industry and how we've seen that change over 00:05:18.001 --> 00:05:21.001 the last 50, 60, 70 years. 00:05:21.001 --> 00:05:26.001 And and the resulting system that we have today, Brewster talked a little bit 00:05:26.001 --> 00:05:31.001 about some of the challenges that that poses for libraries and that same system 00:05:31.001 --> 00:05:35.001 poses an awful lot of challenges for authors as well who are trying to have their 00:05:35.001 --> 00:05:40.001 voice heard and trying to get in front of readers in ways that can 00:05:40.001 --> 00:05:42.000 expand their reach and impact. 00:05:42.000 --> 00:05:49.000 And a consolidated publishing industry poses some challenges for that. 00:05:49.000 --> 00:05:51.001 So I think it's a fantastic book. 00:05:51.001 --> 00:05:54.000 I really encourage you all to go out and buy a copy. 00:05:57.000 --> 00:05:59.001 And and I bet you'll not want to put it down like me. 00:06:02.000 --> 00:06:06.000 So so I did want to say a little bit more about Authors Alliance and then I'm 00:06:06.000 --> 00:06:11.001 going to give some introductions to Dan and to our moderator, Ted Underwood. 00:06:12.001 --> 00:06:18.001 So if you're not familiar with Authors Alliance, we are a nonprofit that is just 00:06:18.001 --> 00:06:21.000 about to celebrate our 10th anniversary. 00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:27.001 We were formed in or launched in May of 2014 and actually we're going to host our 00:06:27.001 --> 00:06:34.001 10th anniversary celebration event at the Internet Archive, the title of which is 00:06:34.001 --> 00:06:38.001 Monopolies and Moral Panic and actually getting at some of the issues associated 00:06:38.001 --> 00:06:42.001 with having large consolidated publishing industries and 00:06:42.001 --> 00:06:44.000 platforms and things like that. 00:06:45.000 --> 00:06:49.001 So I think we'll have a little slide at the end inviting you all to that. 00:06:50.000 --> 00:06:53.001 If you want to learn more about Authors Alliance and some of the work that we do, 00:06:54.000 --> 00:06:56.001 you can find us. I think there's a link put in the chat. 00:06:57.001 --> 00:06:59.001 And you're definitely welcome to join. 00:07:00.000 --> 00:07:03.000 We welcome authors of all types. 00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:09.001 We have everybody as members from from Nobel Prize winners to fan fiction writers 00:07:09.001 --> 00:07:12.000 to aspiring novelists. 00:07:13.001 --> 00:07:17.001 And why I think it really unites us together is that we are a group of authors 00:07:17.001 --> 00:07:22.001 who are interested in using our work for the public good. 00:07:24.000 --> 00:07:26.000 So that's enough about Authors Alliance. 00:07:27.000 --> 00:07:29.000 I'd like to make a couple of introductions. 00:07:29.001 --> 00:07:32.001 First to our moderator, Ted Underwood. 00:07:33.001 --> 00:07:39.000 So Ted Underwood is a professor in the School of Information Science Sciences and 00:07:39.000 --> 00:07:44.000 also holds an appointment with the Department of English in the College of 00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:47.000 Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois. 00:07:48.000 --> 00:07:51.001 After writing two books that describe 18th and 19th century literature using 00:07:51.001 --> 00:07:55.001 familiar critical methods, he turned to new opportunities 00:07:55.001 --> 00:07:57.001 created by large digital libraries. 00:07:58.000 --> 00:08:02.000 And since that time, his research has explored literary patterns that have become 00:08:02.000 --> 00:08:05.001 visible across long timelines when we consider hundreds 00:08:05.001 --> 00:08:07.000 of thousands of books at once. 00:08:07.000 --> 00:08:12.001 And he's kind of low key famous among, I think, the digital humanities and text 00:08:12.001 --> 00:08:14.000 data mining crowd. 00:08:14.001 --> 00:08:17.001 And so really a treat to have him here today. 00:08:18.000 --> 00:08:24.000 He's authored three books about literary history, Distant Horizons, published by 00:08:24.000 --> 00:08:29.001 Chicago University of Chicago Press, Why Literary Periods Matter, Historical 00:08:29.001 --> 00:08:35.001 Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies by Stanford University Press, and 00:08:35.001 --> 00:08:40.001 The Work of the Sun, Literature, Science and Political Economy, 1760 to 1860. 00:08:42.001 --> 00:08:45.001 So Ted will be moderating today. 00:08:47.001 --> 00:08:52.000 And we are going to hear first from Dan Sinnekin, assistant professor of English 00:08:52.000 --> 00:08:55.001 with a courtesy appointment in quantitative theory and methods 00:08:55.001 --> 00:08:57.000 from Emory University. 00:08:58.001 --> 00:09:03.001 In addition to big fiction, he's the author of American Literature and the Long 00:09:03.001 --> 00:09:06.000 Downturn Neoliberal Apocalypse. 00:09:06.001 --> 00:09:10.000 By Oxford University Press, published in 2020. 00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:14.000 And his writing has appeared all over. 00:09:15.000 --> 00:09:18.001 He's in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books 00:09:18.001 --> 00:09:25.001 and elsewhere. And he is also co-founder and co-editor of the Post 45 00:09:25.001 --> 00:09:31.000 Data Collective, which peer reviews and houses post 1945 literary and cultural 00:09:31.000 --> 00:09:33.001 data on an open access website. 00:09:33.001 --> 00:09:34.001 It's a really cool resource. 00:09:35.001 --> 00:09:42.001 So with that, I am going to turn it over to Ted and Dan, and 00:09:42.001 --> 00:09:45.001 we're going to have a really good book talk. So thanks. 00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:54.001 All right. Well, it is wonderful to be here. 00:09:55.000 --> 00:09:58.001 I am so grateful for the opportunity from the Internet Archive 00:09:58.001 --> 00:10:00.001 and from Authors Alliance. 00:10:00.001 --> 00:10:06.001 And grateful to Ted as well for being my interlocutor for this event. 00:10:06.001 --> 00:10:11.001 So I'm going to begin just by saying a few words about big fiction and a few 00:10:11.001 --> 00:10:14.001 notes specific to this occasion. 00:10:16.000 --> 00:10:21.000 So big fiction is a history of what I call the conglomerate era in publishing 00:10:21.000 --> 00:10:24.001 with special attention, as the title suggests, to fiction. 00:10:25.000 --> 00:10:30.000 Now, the publishing industry looks radically different today than it did 00:10:30.000 --> 00:10:31.001 60 or 70 years ago. 00:10:32.000 --> 00:10:36.001 If you ported back to the 1950s, you would find a collection of 00:10:36.001 --> 00:10:38.001 smallish independent publishers. 00:10:39.001 --> 00:10:43.001 Back then, Random House had something like 200 employees total. 00:10:44.001 --> 00:10:49.000 Today, Penguin Random House has about 10,000 employees. 00:10:50.001 --> 00:10:56.000 Now, most of those publishers back in the 1950s were run by the founders or the 00:10:56.000 --> 00:10:59.001 heirs of the founders. They were usually family businesses. 00:11:00.001 --> 00:11:03.000 And so they were run, for the most part, by book people. 00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:08.000 And book people were notoriously not terribly efficient. 00:11:08.000 --> 00:11:11.000 They were not the most effective business people. 00:11:12.001 --> 00:11:18.000 Beginning in the 1960s, large conglomerates started to consolidate the industry. 00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:20.000 They began to acquire publishers. 00:11:20.001 --> 00:11:26.001 And the velocity of this consolidation increased in the late 1970s and continued 00:11:26.001 --> 00:11:33.000 onward in subsequent decades until by the early 21st century, there were just 00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:38.001 six, the big six conglomerates that had consolidated something like 80 percent of 00:11:38.001 --> 00:11:45.001 trade publishing that was reduced to five in 2013 when Penguin and Random House 00:11:45.001 --> 00:11:47.000 merged. 00:11:49.000 --> 00:11:54.000 What I do in big fiction is I tell the story of what all of this consolidation 00:11:54.000 --> 00:11:55.001 has meant for fiction. 00:11:56.000 --> 00:12:01.000 Now, a couple notes for this occasion in this audience. 00:12:01.001 --> 00:12:06.000 There was some small amount of data gathering and computational analysis that 00:12:06.000 --> 00:12:11.000 undergirds big fiction. I would have done more if it had been easier to acquire 00:12:11.000 --> 00:12:16.000 and study text under copyright prior to 2021 when I did most of the work, a 00:12:16.000 --> 00:12:21.000 project that Dave Hanson and Authors Alliance have been hard at work on from one 00:12:21.000 --> 00:12:26.000 particular angle, and I'm grateful to them for that. And as Dave was saying, my 00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:31.000 interlocutor Ted is definitely low-key famous in this world. 00:12:31.000 --> 00:12:36.000 He's arguably the leading practitioner of computational literary studies, period. 00:12:37.001 --> 00:12:41.000 Now, there have been a few interesting developments in the publishing industry in 00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:45.000 just the last few years, essentially, since I finished writing the book. And I 00:12:45.000 --> 00:12:50.001 just want to note a few things about those at the outset. The Department of 00:12:50.001 --> 00:12:54.001 Justice, the U.S. Department of Justice, sued to block Penguin Random House from 00:12:54.001 --> 00:13:00.000 acquiring Simon and Schister on antitrust grounds. And they won that case, 00:13:00.001 --> 00:13:06.000 possibly suggesting that we are reaching some sort of limit to consolidating the 00:13:06.000 --> 00:13:13.000 industry at this point. So instead, KKR, a private equity firm, may be most 00:13:13.000 --> 00:13:19.000 well known for bankrupting Toys R Us, came in and acquired 00:13:19.000 --> 00:13:24.001 Simon and Schister. And the entrance of private equity into the publishing 00:13:24.001 --> 00:13:31.000 industry is a new development that everyone is watching. But arguably the 00:13:31.000 --> 00:13:37.000 biggest development of the 21st century is the explosion of born digital fiction. 00:13:37.001 --> 00:13:43.000 A vast amount of literature is now self-published through digital platforms like 00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:48.001 Kindle Direct Publishing, or is contributed to fan fiction sites like Archive of 00:13:48.001 --> 00:13:54.000 Our Own or written through Wattpad, a social networking fiction writing site with 00:13:54.000 --> 00:14:01.000 tens of millions of monthly users. And each of these platforms, KDP, Archive 00:14:01.000 --> 00:14:05.001 of Our Own, and Wattpad, are different and important in substantive ways. 00:14:07.000 --> 00:14:10.001 This whole universe of internet fiction exists mostly in 00:14:10.001 --> 00:14:12.000 parallel to traditional publishing. 00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:17.001 And there are only at this point relatively few transmissions between. Now the 00:14:17.001 --> 00:14:22.000 last thing I'll say is just a note about AI, which is certainly on everyone's 00:14:22.000 --> 00:14:28.000 minds in publishing today for many different reasons, actually. There's one about 00:14:28.000 --> 00:14:34.001 questions about the fair use of literature as used by 00:14:34.001 --> 00:14:41.000 AI companies in the training data to train their models. There's also already a 00:14:41.000 --> 00:14:46.000 lot of authors, especially in the KDP world. Self-published writers already 00:14:46.000 --> 00:14:48.001 collaborating with AI to write fiction. 00:14:50.001 --> 00:14:54.001 And finally, within publishing the big conglomerate publishing houses, they're 00:14:54.001 --> 00:14:57.001 looking at AI as a way to increase the efficiency 00:14:57.001 --> 00:14:59.000 and productivity of their workforce. 00:15:00.000 --> 00:15:06.000 So I'm aware that already there is a Penguin Random House has PRH GPT as of 00:15:06.000 --> 00:15:10.001 recently, which I imagine they're going to be using in-house to try to speed up 00:15:10.001 --> 00:15:15.000 things like copywriting on the covers. So if you start to see some hallucinations 00:15:15.000 --> 00:15:22.000 on the covers of books from Penguin Random House, you might know the source. But 00:15:22.000 --> 00:15:27.000 okay, that's enough for me just kind of to get started. So I'm going to 00:15:27.000 --> 00:15:29.000 say let's get into it. 00:15:33.001 --> 00:15:39.001 Thanks, Dan. And congratulations on this book, which is a real pleasure to read 00:15:39.001 --> 00:15:41.000 and lots of ways. 00:15:42.001 --> 00:15:45.001 And I've got several questions for 00:15:45.001 --> 00:15:47.000 you. I'm going to start with sort of the big picture. 00:15:50.001 --> 00:15:54.000 If you could give us your sense, there's so many different ways of telling this 00:15:54.000 --> 00:15:59.001 story, the story of conglomeration and consolidation in publishing. And when we 00:15:59.001 --> 00:16:05.001 even use the word conglomeration, that tends to suggest an angle on it where 00:16:05.001 --> 00:16:09.001 we're looking at the producers, at the publishing houses, the corporate 00:16:09.001 --> 00:16:15.001 structures that organize them. And there is one way that story can be told where 00:16:15.001 --> 00:16:19.000 that's central. I think you start off the story by saying, well, corporations 00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:22.001 need to grow, they need to demonstrate growth. And one way they can do that is by 00:16:22.001 --> 00:16:27.001 acquiring other corporations. But there are also other ways of telling the story 00:16:27.001 --> 00:16:31.001 that are woven through this volume, because it's a story with multiple facets. 00:16:32.000 --> 00:16:36.001 And for instance, one could focus on readers, are they distracted by television? 00:16:37.000 --> 00:16:42.001 And is that cutting into the mass market part of the publishing industry? Or on 00:16:42.001 --> 00:16:47.000 the other hand, is it just the growth of readership that sort of inevitably leads 00:16:47.000 --> 00:16:53.000 to gigantism in publishing, or beyond publishing and reading this, other part of 00:16:53.000 --> 00:16:58.000 it, which is publicity and distribution. And at moments, you talk about the rise 00:16:58.000 --> 00:17:03.001 of the book tour and the publicity campaign, as well as sort of a factor in the 00:17:03.001 --> 00:17:08.001 new scale of publishing. So I'm not necessarily asking you to choose between 00:17:08.001 --> 00:17:13.000 these. But if you wanted to weave these into a story about the reason for 00:17:13.000 --> 00:17:15.001 conglomeration, how would you do that? 00:17:18.001 --> 00:17:24.000 So I would, this whole interlocking set of pieces, 00:17:25.001 --> 00:17:31.001 and like the big sort of upheaval, it really a lot of what we see today is a 00:17:31.001 --> 00:17:36.000 result of things that happen structurally at a number of different layers from 00:17:36.000 --> 00:17:41.001 the people who own the publishing companies, to changes in how literary agents 00:17:41.001 --> 00:17:46.000 work to how distribution was revolutionized by a company called Ingram to the 00:17:46.000 --> 00:17:51.001 rise of chain bookstores. And a lot of this was happening in the late 1970s and 00:17:51.001 --> 00:17:57.000 the 1980s. And a lot of the impulse for it happening at that moment is because of 00:17:57.000 --> 00:18:03.001 what was going on at a very high level economically. So the 1950s and 1960s were 00:18:03.001 --> 00:18:07.001 this incredible period, one of the greatest periods of capitalist growth in the 00:18:07.001 --> 00:18:12.001 United States, but also then anywhere in the history of capitalism. And that 00:18:12.001 --> 00:18:17.001 meant that there were all these new readers, all this, this good time, there was 00:18:17.001 --> 00:18:23.001 just like expansive growth happening in books then. And in the 1970s, we had 00:18:23.001 --> 00:18:28.000 state inflation. So books are starting to cost more. Wages are stagnating, people 00:18:28.000 --> 00:18:33.000 have less money to buy books. But these new conglomerates are now beholden to 00:18:33.000 --> 00:18:35.000 shareholder value and need a 00:18:50.000 --> 00:18:50.001 [...] 00:18:53.001 --> 00:18:59.001 chain bookstores that are emerging in suburban shopping malls in the form of 00:18:59.001 --> 00:19:05.000 Walden books and B Dalton. And all of this creates the conditions out of which 00:19:05.000 --> 00:19:07.000 the world [...] this is you can see changes in the kind of books that get 00:19:07.000 --> 00:19:13.000 published. So for example, fantasy was not a genre in the way we understand it 00:19:13.000 --> 00:19:17.000 today until it was able to take advantage of exactly all those developments that 00:19:17.000 --> 00:19:24.000 I just named. There was a canny editor working in 00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:26.001 a new imprint called Del Rey. 00:19:27.001 --> 00:19:31.001 And he saw that if you took Lord of the Rings and made a really derivative 00:19:31.001 --> 00:19:37.000 formulaic versions of it, you could turn fantasy into a genre that 12 year olds 00:19:37.000 --> 00:19:43.000 like me in 1995 would go to this shopping mall with my mom and we'd stop into 00:19:43.000 --> 00:19:48.000 Walden books and I'd see the Pierce Anthony Zant series and I grabbed them and 00:19:48.000 --> 00:19:52.001 read them. All of that, the reason, so this is a big part of why I wrote this 00:19:52.001 --> 00:19:58.000 story. I was like, why did I pull Zant off the bookshelf in 1995? The answer is 00:19:58.000 --> 00:20:03.000 all of these developments that were interlocking in really that moment from like 00:20:03.000 --> 00:20:06.001 the mid 70s to the mid 80s was kind of the major moment of upheaval. 00:20:10.000 --> 00:20:14.001 Fascinating. Thanks. That highlights what you think is the sort of the crucial 00:20:14.001 --> 00:20:21.000 transformation with lots of other things going on. But you know, so beyond the 00:20:21.000 --> 00:20:26.000 story of conglomeration, I would say in some ways, you know, that's on the title, 00:20:26.000 --> 00:20:30.001 that's on the front cover, but in some ways this is a bigger story because it's 00:20:30.001 --> 00:20:35.001 not just the story of the conglomerates themselves, but also of other niches in 00:20:35.001 --> 00:20:40.000 the publishing industry, the nonprofits, the independents who don't go, you know, 00:20:40.000 --> 00:20:46.001 publicly owned and how their particular role in the market also shapes what they 00:20:46.001 --> 00:20:51.001 decide to do and the kind of fiction that they decide to publish. You could say 00:20:51.001 --> 00:20:55.000 that, you know, it's the story of conglomeration, but also at moments you hint, 00:20:55.001 --> 00:21:00.001 it's more broadly trying to get us to sort of stop thinking just about individual 00:21:00.001 --> 00:21:05.001 authors of books and think about the sort of collective economic institutional 00:21:05.001 --> 00:21:12.001 system that produces books and produces particular niches in 00:21:12.001 --> 00:21:17.000 the marketplace. And yet the here's the contradiction I want to set up for you or 00:21:17.000 --> 00:21:22.000 want to invite you to explain. I don't think I've ever read a literary history 00:21:22.000 --> 00:21:27.001 that is more focused on individuals than this one. At the same time as like, you 00:21:27.001 --> 00:21:34.000 know, in a sense it's about big institutional and economic forces. In fact, every 00:21:34.000 --> 00:21:38.000 page of this book has an individual story on it, you know, vivid individual 00:21:38.000 --> 00:21:44.001 stories. I just looked up, you know, Bennett Cerf in the index and I saw, you 00:21:44.001 --> 00:21:49.001 know, Bennett Cerf comma sexism exclamation point of and that the story is so 00:21:49.001 --> 00:21:54.000 dramatic that it really needs that exclamation point. But there are also, you 00:21:54.000 --> 00:21:59.000 know, positive stories, just a lot of different individuals. How, why is, you 00:21:59.000 --> 00:22:02.001 know, why did you decide to tell the story so much as a story about individual 00:22:02.001 --> 00:22:05.000 people given the kind of story it is? 00:22:06.000 --> 00:22:12.000 Yes. So in my mind, you've put your finger on the great drama of big fiction, 00:22:12.000 --> 00:22:18.001 which is the drama of the individual and the system and how these two are 00:22:18.001 --> 00:22:25.001 always in a sort of agonistic battle through publishing. And, 00:22:25.001 --> 00:22:31.000 you know, there's one particular kind of individual that tends to get elevated 00:22:31.000 --> 00:22:38.000 and focused on to the exclusion of the vast majority 00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:43.000 of the others. And that is the figure of the author. So the figure of the author, 00:22:43.001 --> 00:22:48.000 we fetishize the figure of the author in this country. And there's deep 00:22:48.000 --> 00:22:54.000 historical roots. Lots of reasons why we do this. We love the fantasy of the 00:22:54.000 --> 00:22:59.001 solitary author drawing from the creativity of their imagination to deliver works 00:22:59.001 --> 00:23:05.001 of genius from their minds to ours. That's often what we go to bookstores and 00:23:05.001 --> 00:23:10.001 pull bookshelves, books out the book. And the reality of the book is that 00:23:10.001 --> 00:23:17.000 experience, that fantasy of authorship. That's why publishers emblazon 00:23:17.000 --> 00:23:21.000 the covers of their books with the name of the author, but hide the publisher in 00:23:21.000 --> 00:23:25.001 a way that's a little harder to find. But the problem with this vision is that if 00:23:25.001 --> 00:23:32.001 you start to pay attention to how books are made, you start to see a very 00:23:32.001 --> 00:23:38.001 different picture. And now I'm hardly the first person to burst this bubble. I 00:23:38.001 --> 00:23:43.000 mean, I think you and I, Ted, share something like a structuralist or even post 00:23:43.000 --> 00:23:47.000 -structuralist conception of ideation and authorship, how cognition works. 00:23:48.001 --> 00:23:54.000 But I'm coming at it from a very specific angle of the nitty gritty of 00:23:54.000 --> 00:23:58.001 publishing. And so I posit something in this book that I call conglomerate 00:23:58.001 --> 00:24:05.000 authorship, which I offer as an alternative to the bromance of the singular 00:24:05.000 --> 00:24:11.001 genius. And so on one end, there are many books that are sold to us as solo 00:24:11.001 --> 00:24:15.000 author that are actually just blatantly industrial productions. 00:24:15.000 --> 00:24:19.000 It's like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were actually written by what's called 00:24:19.000 --> 00:24:24.001 the Stradimire Syndicate, but all packaged under a single fake name. Or the 00:24:24.001 --> 00:24:29.000 vastly popular mid-century mystery writer Earl Stanley Gardner, who created Perry 00:24:29.000 --> 00:24:33.000 Mason, had a fiction factory on his California ranch. But I argue in the book 00:24:33.000 --> 00:24:37.000 that even major figures like Joan Didion or Cormac McCarthy or Toni Morrison are 00:24:37.000 --> 00:24:41.001 themselves part of this conglomerate authorship, this collective authorship. 00:24:42.000 --> 00:24:46.000 Now, the reason, and this includes a bureaucratic assemblage, this conglomerate 00:24:46.000 --> 00:24:51.001 authorship, is the effect or the output of a bureaucratic assemblage of agents, 00:24:51.001 --> 00:24:56.001 editors, marketers, wholesalers, book buyers, and more. And these are all the 00:24:56.001 --> 00:25:00.001 individuals who populate the pages of the book. 00:25:00.001 --> 00:25:05.000 And so one of the things I'm doing is try to show how this disseminated, 00:25:05.000 --> 00:25:10.001 distributed collection of characters, all decisions that they're making under the 00:25:10.001 --> 00:25:17.001 particular constraints of systems, is producing part of a feedback loop 00:25:17.001 --> 00:25:21.001 that works its way all the way back to the author and all the way out to the 00:25:21.001 --> 00:25:27.000 reader through any various numbers of mediated steps that affects the very actual 00:25:27.000 --> 00:25:34.000 words that appear on the page that we read. Right. So you talk about it 00:25:34.000 --> 00:25:40.001 sometimes as not just the author's name on the title page, but you're one 00:25:40.001 --> 00:25:45.000 to foreground the people who are hidden in the colophon or the publisher's mark. 00:25:46.000 --> 00:25:52.001 Yeah, exactly. And very small, but there's a lot of people in 00:25:52.001 --> 00:25:57.001 that. And yet, I mean, I want to sort of press you a little bit more on sort of 00:25:57.001 --> 00:26:01.001 the decisions you're making the way to tell the story, because you could 00:26:01.001 --> 00:26:08.000 foreground publishers, you could tell this as a story of publishing 00:26:08.000 --> 00:26:15.000 houses, and the agents would really be the corporations. But that is not the way 00:26:15.000 --> 00:26:21.000 the story is told. These are people who at one day in 1990 stood up. And 00:26:21.000 --> 00:26:27.000 what is sort of your motivation for telling it 00:26:27.000 --> 00:26:28.001 in such a dramatic way? 00:26:29.000 --> 00:26:36.000 Yeah, there are several. It's tactical. And one is that I was aiming 00:26:36.000 --> 00:26:42.001 with this book for it to hopefully attract readers outside of the Academy. First 00:26:42.001 --> 00:26:45.001 was looking at people in New York publishing and hoping they would read it. But 00:26:45.001 --> 00:26:50.001 really, I wrote it so that hopefully anyone who enjoys fiction might find the 00:26:50.001 --> 00:26:55.000 backstory interesting. And to make that story compelling and dramatic, I kept 00:26:55.000 --> 00:27:00.000 finding all these stories compelling, dramatic people. And so at that way, it's a 00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:05.000 way to kind of keep, hopefully keep people turning the pages. So that's one. 00:27:06.000 --> 00:27:11.000 Another is that as I studied for this book, the more that I found that literary 00:27:11.000 --> 00:27:16.000 history and what we understand of it is full of contingencies. 00:27:16.000 --> 00:27:22.001 It's not a deterministic story. Just because conglomeration can appear in 00:27:22.001 --> 00:27:27.001 retrospect, like this one gradually proceeding deterministic monster going onward 00:27:27.001 --> 00:27:34.000 and growing, there's always the idiosyncrasies of individual people making 00:27:34.000 --> 00:27:39.001 decisions, change literary history. I mean, a great example of that is how WW 00:27:39.001 --> 00:27:43.001 Norton, there's a whole chapter dedicated to WW Norton, the last main chapter of 00:27:43.001 --> 00:27:49.001 the book. It's about independence. The way it has escaped conglomeration is just 00:27:49.001 --> 00:27:54.001 like the guy, William Warner Norton died young. His wife sold the company to its 00:27:54.001 --> 00:27:59.000 employees. It became employee owned. And then it teamed up with a Cornell 00:27:59.000 --> 00:28:05.001 University professor, Ted and I are both Cornell University alums named M.H. 00:28:05.001 --> 00:28:10.001 Abrams who created the Norton Anthology. And that spawned this whole series of 00:28:10.001 --> 00:28:14.000 books that became incredibly profitable for WW Norton. All of this meant that 00:28:14.000 --> 00:28:18.001 decades later, as an employee owned company with a strong college division that 00:28:18.001 --> 00:28:23.001 financed it extremely well, it could do things on the trade side starting in the 00:28:23.001 --> 00:28:27.001 1990s that no one else could do. It could continue to reject and rebuff 00:28:27.001 --> 00:28:33.000 conglomerate people who wanted to buy it. And then it had enough success from the 00:28:33.000 --> 00:28:36.000 college side that it could do weird things. So there were, they hired an editor 00:28:36.000 --> 00:28:40.001 named Jerry Howard and Jerry Howard could get away with bringing in a guy who 00:28:40.001 --> 00:28:45.000 books didn't look like anyone would be interested in them named Chuck Polanyik 00:28:45.000 --> 00:28:50.000 and publish a book called Fight Club, or they could publish Patrick O'Brien who 00:28:50.000 --> 00:28:53.001 had been tried twice before in the United States and failed twice before in the 00:28:53.001 --> 00:28:58.001 United States. And in 1990, they could try Master and Commander, you know, 00:28:59.000 --> 00:29:02.001 massive success, but that wouldn't have happened in the conglomerates. They 00:29:02.001 --> 00:29:07.000 wouldn't have tried it after two fails. But by going down to the level of the 00:29:07.000 --> 00:29:11.001 individual, you're able to see, make sense of in ways that you wouldn't if you 00:29:11.001 --> 00:29:14.000 had just narrated it from the top level abstraction. 00:29:15.000 --> 00:29:20.001 Right, right. There are interesting exceptions and counter currents. And, and, 00:29:20.001 --> 00:29:27.000 yeah, and individual people who make a difference. It's a nice story. One of the, 00:29:27.000 --> 00:29:34.000 one of the interesting sort of echoes of this 00:29:34.000 --> 00:29:40.001 is the role of auto fiction in the story, which in some ways kind of is 00:29:40.001 --> 00:29:47.000 a kind of a fictional version of the foregrounding of 00:29:47.000 --> 00:29:51.001 individuals that we've been talking about and the way you tell the story. But it 00:29:51.001 --> 00:29:57.000 has complicated implications, and it's hard to sort of figure out quite what the 00:29:57.000 --> 00:30:03.000 relationship of auto fiction, foregrounding the person of the writer, maybe as a 00:30:03.000 --> 00:30:08.000 character in the story, implicitly or explicitly, what relation 00:30:08.000 --> 00:30:09.001 that has to conglomeration. 00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:16.001 And I think there may be a couple different ways of telling that that you 00:30:16.001 --> 00:30:20.001 explore, and that may both be true, but I'm kind of inviting you to explore them. 00:30:20.001 --> 00:30:25.001 That at one moment, I think you quote, and maybe Joe Moran is saying, you know, 00:30:25.001 --> 00:30:30.000 the new demands for publicity, you know, these publicity campaigns, author 00:30:30.000 --> 00:30:37.000 photos, you know, auto fiction is in a way a reflection of that new conglomerate 00:30:37.000 --> 00:30:42.000 scale publicity industry that was making authors into kind of many celebrities. 00:30:42.000 --> 00:30:47.001 So kind of an echo of the corporate pressures on fiction. But there are other 00:30:47.001 --> 00:30:53.000 moments where you say, like, auto fiction is authors kind of trying to claw back 00:30:53.000 --> 00:31:00.000 some agency from this massive system and, you know, foreground an older version 00:31:00.000 --> 00:31:06.001 of authorial power. So can it be both of those things? How do you see 00:31:06.001 --> 00:31:11.000 the story of auto fiction? Yeah, I mean, it is what, you know, academics might 00:31:11.000 --> 00:31:15.000 sometimes call overdetermined, which is just to say that there's a lot of reasons 00:31:15.000 --> 00:31:20.000 why it works, and they're coming from different directions. And some of them, 00:31:20.000 --> 00:31:22.001 yes, as you say, are in tension. So 00:31:26.000 --> 00:31:32.001 there's that shibboleth, right, what you know. And writers are often always, you 00:31:32.001 --> 00:31:35.001 know, drawing consciously or unconsciously at some level from their life. And 00:31:35.001 --> 00:31:39.000 when and his writing has become increasingly professionalized in the last several 00:31:39.000 --> 00:31:45.001 decades, increasingly reliant on marketing and publicity. Exactly as you say, 00:31:46.000 --> 00:31:51.001 this is just this fact that an author is becoming part of the promotion is 00:31:51.001 --> 00:31:56.000 becoming a brand unto themselves, is becoming more and more involved with the 00:31:56.000 --> 00:32:02.001 bureaucratic publishing environment. It becomes something that gets folded into 00:32:02.001 --> 00:32:05.001 the writing and an argument I across the book, because this isn't only the case 00:32:05.001 --> 00:32:09.000 in auto fiction, that there's a kind of almost science fiction and this 00:32:09.000 --> 00:32:14.001 conglomerate authorship ways in which allegories of conglomeration make their way 00:32:14.001 --> 00:32:20.000 into books and auto fiction is kind of the most explicit version of how that 00:32:20.000 --> 00:32:25.000 happens. And in the explicitness, that's part of authors taking some autonomy 00:32:25.000 --> 00:32:31.001 back, taking some control back, making themselves the agent, the protagonist, the 00:32:31.001 --> 00:32:36.000 one who is doing the actions, who is, you know, in when that when Ben Lerner 00:32:36.000 --> 00:32:41.000 writes in 1004 about his relationship with his agent and the deal they made to 00:32:41.000 --> 00:32:46.000 sell the book that we are reading, he's getting a chance to voice his own 00:32:46.000 --> 00:32:51.001 concerns, he's getting a chance to voice his own ambivalences. And in that way, 00:32:51.001 --> 00:32:57.000 he's taking control back. But for his publisher for FSG, by making Ben Lerner by 00:32:57.000 --> 00:33:03.001 making Ben the central character of 1004. It's also putting him even more front 00:33:03.001 --> 00:33:10.000 and center as the brand more front and center as sort of marketing occasion, and 00:33:10.000 --> 00:33:15.000 hiding further the bureaucratic publishing machine, which is informing the 00:33:15.000 --> 00:33:18.001 elements of publishing. So on the one hand for the conglomerate, auto fiction 00:33:18.001 --> 00:33:25.001 allows them to kind of still foreground the author, and the author gets to claw 00:33:25.001 --> 00:33:29.001 back some agency. So it's that it's a win. It's a win win. 00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:35.001 Yeah. And it sounds authors can sort of seize what's being done and use that for 00:33:35.001 --> 00:33:40.001 their own, their own personal brand and an agency. 00:33:41.000 --> 00:33:41.001 Exactly. 00:33:43.000 --> 00:33:48.000 What about I want to talk a little bit about the role that other media have and 00:33:48.000 --> 00:33:53.001 are increasingly having other media ranging from from television to sort of 00:33:53.001 --> 00:33:59.000 fanfic on the internet. But I think one maybe a maybe a bridge to that would be 00:33:59.000 --> 00:34:03.001 to talk a little bit about this phenomenon of literary genre fiction, just the 00:34:03.001 --> 00:34:09.001 the boundaries blurring between what we think of as as literary trade publishing, 00:34:11.000 --> 00:34:17.001 and the sort of high end of trade. And, and then, you know, noir detective, 00:34:18.000 --> 00:34:22.001 science fiction, Colson Whitehead, you say, I think, at one point is sort of the 00:34:22.001 --> 00:34:26.001 king of literary genre, but there are many, many other examples. And it might 00:34:26.001 --> 00:34:30.001 extend even down into things we don't think of as genre fiction, but there might 00:34:30.001 --> 00:34:37.001 be that written by, you know, say, Toni Morrison or, or someone. What role this, 00:34:38.001 --> 00:34:43.001 this is speculation on my part, but is could part of that story be television 00:34:43.001 --> 00:34:48.001 eating into the mass market side and sort of genre fiction being pushed toward 00:34:48.001 --> 00:34:52.001 literature as much as literature wanting to the literary authors reaching out to 00:34:52.001 --> 00:34:58.000 use the genre tropes? What, what story would you tell about it? 00:34:58.001 --> 00:35:02.000 Yeah, no, I think there's no question. And actually, there's a there's a great 00:35:02.000 --> 00:35:06.001 book that just came out in the last few weeks by a great scholar of publishing 00:35:06.001 --> 00:35:12.000 named Evan Breyer, called Novel Competition. And he really tells that story about 00:35:12.000 --> 00:35:18.001 what the emergence of television and and other forms of mass culture did to 00:35:18.001 --> 00:35:24.001 fiction and novels and how novelists responded. And undoubted the the competition 00:35:24.001 --> 00:35:29.001 from television shaped some of the drive to make literary fiction 00:35:31.000 --> 00:35:37.001 more popular, popularly accessible through the use of genre. One thing that I 00:35:37.001 --> 00:35:43.001 found sort of late in the writing of this book was that the terms genre fiction 00:35:43.001 --> 00:35:49.001 and literary fiction didn't actually even have circulation. Genre, I mean, this 00:35:49.001 --> 00:35:55.001 was Andrew Goldstone published a great article on this very recently about how 00:35:55.001 --> 00:36:00.000 genre fiction as a term only emerged in the 1970s in literary fiction post dates 00:36:00.000 --> 00:36:06.001 that literary fiction only emerges in the 1980s. And the argument that I make 00:36:06.001 --> 00:36:13.001 is that literary fiction emerged in that specific moment as a it's a it's a it's 00:36:13.001 --> 00:36:18.000 a it's another genre and it's a form of commercialization. It's a way on the 00:36:18.000 --> 00:36:22.001 market to distinguish literary fiction from genre fiction only after genre 00:36:22.001 --> 00:36:26.000 fiction came. And we had specific genres, we had mystery, we had Western, we had 00:36:26.000 --> 00:36:31.000 romance, but to think of them all as a specific kind of thing together that we 00:36:31.000 --> 00:36:34.001 call genre in the 50s and 60s mass market publishers 00:36:34.001 --> 00:36:36.000 were publishing all of these together. 00:36:36.001 --> 00:36:40.001 There weren't these distinctions. These distinctions are part of the process that 00:36:40.001 --> 00:36:44.001 I described of that moment of the mid 70s late 70s when conglomeration 00:36:44.001 --> 00:36:49.001 intensified in a world of state inflation and publishers were starting to think 00:36:49.001 --> 00:36:55.001 about how can we make novels more effective and replicable mass cultural items 00:36:55.001 --> 00:37:02.000 and that's when genre fiction became this reified category. It was really hard to 00:37:02.000 --> 00:37:07.001 publish literary fiction then in the late 70s and early 80s until this this 00:37:07.001 --> 00:37:11.001 enterprising editor and Gary Fiskett John at Random House started vintage 00:37:11.001 --> 00:37:17.000 contemporaries which had these and big part of that series in 1984 when they 00:37:17.000 --> 00:37:21.001 launched was these covers. The cover of big fiction is an homage to the covers of 00:37:21.001 --> 00:37:25.000 vintage contemporaries and they published Jay McInerney who was a friend of Gary 00:37:25.000 --> 00:37:30.001 Fiskett John's from college, Bright Lights Big City, massive hit. They published 00:37:30.001 --> 00:37:35.000 it as a paperback first for a lot of reasons that I could go into but that was 00:37:35.000 --> 00:37:40.001 not done at the time and by doing that they resuscitated this thing that was now 00:37:40.001 --> 00:37:45.001 called literary fiction and very quickly this thing called literary fiction 00:37:45.001 --> 00:37:49.001 needed to figure out other ways in order to be profitable at conglomerate houses 00:37:49.001 --> 00:37:54.000 and one of the first geniuses to figure out how to do that was Cormac McCarthy 00:37:54.001 --> 00:38:01.001 who changed his whole strategy of publishing with All the Pretty Horses 00:38:01.001 --> 00:38:07.001 in 1992 which is like a Louis L'amour western in a Cormac McCarthy voice which is 00:38:07.001 --> 00:38:10.001 unlike anything he had done before. There's a whole story to tell there too but 00:38:10.001 --> 00:38:17.001 enough for now. Thanks that's fascinating 00:38:17.001 --> 00:38:23.000 and thanks for the lead to novel competition among other things. 00:38:24.001 --> 00:38:30.001 So let's move a little bit toward the present and sort of what's happening and 00:38:30.001 --> 00:38:36.001 what might happen. One of the interesting things in your conclusion is you 00:38:36.001 --> 00:38:42.001 acknowledge a lot of contemporary trends that people have framed as sort of 00:38:42.001 --> 00:38:49.000 challenging the dominant publishing model and I mean you know fanfic 00:38:49.000 --> 00:38:55.000 self-publishing and Amazon's sort of alliance with the self-publishing ecosystem, 00:38:56.000 --> 00:39:00.001 social media and we could also gesture it you know the older sorts of competition 00:39:00.001 --> 00:39:04.001 like from television and film but also especially audiobooks. Audiobooks have 00:39:04.001 --> 00:39:09.001 been booming. You acknowledge all of that but at the same time you end up saying 00:39:09.001 --> 00:39:16.000 it's still a the way you put it I think is interesting. 00:39:16.001 --> 00:39:23.001 It's not that these things aren't happening necessarily but that the 00:39:23.001 --> 00:39:30.000 conglomerate publishers don't really care and from their perspective 00:39:30.000 --> 00:39:35.001 these forces are not they don't loom large. Am I 00:39:35.001 --> 00:39:42.001 presenting that right and do you think that's still true? Do you add 00:39:42.001 --> 00:39:48.001 in you know new media, new like interactive forms of fanfic mediated 00:39:48.001 --> 00:39:50.000 by artificial intelligence? 00:39:51.000 --> 00:39:56.000 Will that still be sort of not something that conglomerates need to care about? 00:39:57.000 --> 00:40:02.001 So I would say there's some yes and some no there. I would say in terms of 00:40:02.001 --> 00:40:09.001 thinking about the born digital writing stuff at Wattpad, at AO3, at KDP, largely 00:40:09.001 --> 00:40:13.001 the conglomerate mainstream traditional publishing largely doesn't care except 00:40:13.001 --> 00:40:18.001 when you have a Colleen Hoover or an E.L. James or an Andy Weir something kind of 00:40:18.001 --> 00:40:23.000 popped through and they're like we can pull them into our sphere and make a bunch 00:40:23.000 --> 00:40:27.000 of money on that and so you know people are paying attention. I suspect they're 00:40:27.000 --> 00:40:31.001 increasingly paying attention to what's happening in those spheres in order just 00:40:31.001 --> 00:40:33.001 to pluck you know. 00:40:33.001 --> 00:40:40.000 And in terms of audiobooks though, a way that the conglomerate 00:40:40.000 --> 00:40:46.000 publishers have made a great deal of money in the 21st century is by so 00:40:46.000 --> 00:40:51.001 subsidiary rights is a major form of how publishers earn money which is rights 00:40:51.001 --> 00:40:57.001 beyond the original publication of the book in print. And audiobooks has been a 00:40:57.001 --> 00:41:00.001 huge source of profits for the last 15 years and continues to grow at a rapid 00:41:00.001 --> 00:41:03.001 pace and this has been a huge boon for publishers 00:41:03.001 --> 00:41:05.001 and has helped keep them in the black. 00:41:06.001 --> 00:41:11.000 So they've really leaned into kind of audio rights and they've also leaned into 00:41:11.000 --> 00:41:17.001 foreign rights and trying to expand their the market for U.S. based books in 00:41:17.001 --> 00:41:23.000 say China or India or places around the world. That's another place where they've 00:41:23.000 --> 00:41:27.001 been looking for profits. But yeah the sort of born digital stuff like one of the 00:41:27.001 --> 00:41:31.001 things that's going to be really interesting to watch in the coming years is 00:41:31.001 --> 00:41:36.001 whether or not these two currently largely parallel universes figure out ways to 00:41:36.001 --> 00:41:42.000 merge. Something like Wattpad is already trying to kind of come in as a 00:41:42.000 --> 00:41:45.000 competitor. You know you've got an interesting situation in terms of this 00:41:45.000 --> 00:41:48.001 question of conglomerate authorship that I talk about where you know I'm saying 00:41:48.001 --> 00:41:52.000 cognition happens in the mainstream publishing books through all these 00:41:52.000 --> 00:41:56.000 distributed forces. But if you actually look at something like Wattpad or Archive 00:41:56.000 --> 00:42:00.000 of Our Own it becomes suddenly much more literal. Archive of Our Own, a fan 00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:05.001 fiction site, you've got these people creating these genres you know as a kind of 00:42:05.001 --> 00:42:10.001 comments. Like no one's claiming this sort of copyright of authorship on it and 00:42:10.001 --> 00:42:14.001 then you get these scandals when people do try to take something from Archive of 00:42:14.001 --> 00:42:18.001 Our Own and bring it over and claim it under their own copyright. 00:42:18.001 --> 00:42:25.001 And there's an incredible piece on kind of wolf erotica genre the 00:42:25.001 --> 00:42:29.001 Omegaverse from Alexander Alter in the New York Times about one of the scandals 00:42:29.001 --> 00:42:34.000 when this happens when something that was truly the creation a genre a whole set 00:42:34.000 --> 00:42:39.000 of tropes a whole set of conventions created in the commons. And Wattpad is like 00:42:39.000 --> 00:42:43.000 you know created with constant feedback from readership but then you've got this 00:42:43.000 --> 00:42:48.001 situation where those kind of become privatized. And this is a question like a 00:42:48.001 --> 00:42:54.000 way that like thinking about how authorship is changing in the platform age is 00:42:54.000 --> 00:43:01.000 you know something that I think is really fascinating. Thanks that's 00:43:01.000 --> 00:43:07.001 yeah that's a fascinating story. Can I ask you to comment on 00:43:08.000 --> 00:43:13.000 sort of related to this the effect of other media. Do you think how conscious are 00:43:13.000 --> 00:43:19.000 authors of well there's this thesis out there Option Aesthetics, J.D. Porter, 00:43:19.001 --> 00:43:24.000 Laura McGrath and Xander Manchell sort of argue that authors are now kind of 00:43:24.000 --> 00:43:29.000 writing for film producers because ultimately they can make a lot of money if 00:43:29.000 --> 00:43:34.001 their book is optioned. And so that that shapes the way novels are written now. 00:43:36.000 --> 00:43:41.001 How important is that in this picture and are the conglomerates aware of that? Is 00:43:41.001 --> 00:43:47.001 that a problem for them? Is it a plus for them? Yeah so this fits into this 00:43:47.001 --> 00:43:54.000 idea that sociologists talk about has anticipatory socialization. So authors 00:43:54.000 --> 00:44:00.000 my theory of the author is that they unconsciously or consciously have this sense 00:44:00.000 --> 00:44:04.000 of all of these forces that are going to help make them a success and that gets 00:44:04.000 --> 00:44:08.001 built into the way they design their books. And one of the as you say like one of 00:44:08.001 --> 00:44:14.000 the kind of the biggest lotteries you can enter into as an author is for getting 00:44:14.000 --> 00:44:15.001 optioned for film and TV. 00:44:16.000 --> 00:44:19.001 Now that's a whole other like it gets really complicated so many books are 00:44:19.001 --> 00:44:23.001 optioned and then never pays off but you know the author maybe already collected 00:44:23.001 --> 00:44:30.000 their check. And yeah I mean I think McGrath and Porter and Manchell do a lovely 00:44:30.000 --> 00:44:31.001 I think that piece was in the Atlantic. 00:44:32.001 --> 00:44:37.000 Anyway that piece does a good job of trying to suggest some of the ways that that 00:44:37.000 --> 00:44:41.001 is shaping how people are designing books. Like if you're designing a book to get 00:44:41.001 --> 00:44:48.000 taken up by TV there needs to be a possibility of seriality built into the form 00:44:48.000 --> 00:44:52.001 of the writing itself. How are you going to do that? What's important? How can 00:44:52.001 --> 00:44:57.000 you have a kind of cast of characters that could double over into TV 00:44:57.000 --> 00:45:03.000 specifically? And so yes I mean I don't know how widespread 00:45:03.000 --> 00:45:09.000 and it's in there's also a difference between the people who are aiming you know 00:45:09.000 --> 00:45:13.001 there's we still live in a world of a broad distinction between popularity and 00:45:13.001 --> 00:45:19.000 prestige and there's all the folks who are really gunning for the big money who 00:45:19.000 --> 00:45:21.001 are going to be trying to work with an literary agent and go to a conglomerate 00:45:21.001 --> 00:45:28.001 but there's also like a thriving sphere of small non-profits like New York Review 00:45:28.001 --> 00:45:33.001 Books or Transit, Deep Valom, Grey Wolf, Coffee House on and on and on and on and 00:45:33.001 --> 00:45:39.001 on and here folks are you know avoiding perhaps some of those more profit-driven 00:45:39.001 --> 00:45:42.000 motives that affect the form of their work. 00:45:44.001 --> 00:45:51.000 Fascinating. Although I guess was did Erasure was Erasure originally Grey Wolf 00:45:51.000 --> 00:45:55.000 and then that did just get made into a movie but maybe it's not as that's a 00:45:55.000 --> 00:45:59.000 complicated story too. I mean that's a fascinating story. I mean that required 00:45:59.000 --> 00:46:04.000 you know Percival Everett's a writer who's huge I mean as one of the biggest 00:46:04.000 --> 00:46:09.000 books of the year in 2024 with James his rewriting of Huckleberry Finn published 00:46:09.000 --> 00:46:14.001 with Doubleday for at minimum $500,000 advance maybe a lot more than that but 00:46:14.001 --> 00:46:20.000 here is a guy who's been writing in the trenches for three and a half decades. 00:46:20.000 --> 00:46:25.001 His first books were published in the 80s with big commercial presses but they 00:46:25.001 --> 00:46:31.000 failed and he would have been done but he went to Grey Wolf which was then a 00:46:31.000 --> 00:46:35.001 quite small in the in the early mid 90s a small non-profit and he teamed up with 00:46:35.001 --> 00:46:39.001 Fiona McCray who was a new editor there and she became his champion. So she 00:46:39.001 --> 00:46:44.000 published book after book of his at the small press didn't sell a lot of copies. 00:46:44.001 --> 00:46:48.000 Erasure actually weirdly was published one outlier published by University of New 00:46:48.000 --> 00:46:54.000 England press during those years then was later reissued by Grey Wolf but he you 00:46:54.000 --> 00:46:57.001 know he was not writing books that would be celebrated or published or would work 00:46:57.001 --> 00:47:01.001 with conglomerate presses for decades and only in the last few years after 00:47:01.001 --> 00:47:07.001 building a following building critical like celebration was he able to write the 00:47:07.001 --> 00:47:12.000 book The Trees that made him a finalist for the Booker. Fiona McCray finally 00:47:12.000 --> 00:47:17.000 retires he can take all of this cultural capital he built over decades and kind 00:47:17.000 --> 00:47:22.000 of put it into this advance and Doubleday which is his first one not for Grey 00:47:22.000 --> 00:47:26.000 Wolf in three decades other than erasure. So anyway and then Cor Jefferson 00:47:26.000 --> 00:47:30.001 picking up erasure as its own idiosyncratic story so the contingencies the 00:47:30.001 --> 00:47:36.000 contingencies. Yeah great yeah again individuals have their own stories. 00:47:38.000 --> 00:47:43.001 Well we may have questions from the audience that are beginning to 00:47:43.001 --> 00:47:48.001 pile up in the chat and I want to give Dave a chance to ask some. 00:47:53.000 --> 00:47:58.001 Thanks yes we do indeed have some questions coming up in the chat in fact some 00:47:59.000 --> 00:48:04.001 throughout the talk and some of them you you kind of got to already so I'll skip 00:48:04.001 --> 00:48:09.001 past those. So I promised you an AI question I told you we always get an AI 00:48:09.001 --> 00:48:14.000 question and you got a little bit into it but there was one about the idea of a 00:48:14.000 --> 00:48:19.001 penguin random house GPT or something like that right is is interesting 00:48:19.001 --> 00:48:25.001 and so the question is do you think conglomerates are really against AI we've 00:48:25.001 --> 00:48:30.000 seen a lot of public kind of posturing particularly around copyright or is it 00:48:30.000 --> 00:48:34.001 just AI that they can't control. Oh it's just AI that they can't control 00:48:34.001 --> 00:48:40.000 absolutely you know I mean the new so penguin random house which is the world's 00:48:40.000 --> 00:48:45.001 largest trade publisher they had to pay 200 million dollars to Simon and Schuster 00:48:45.001 --> 00:48:49.001 when they failed after their failed bid and so they had to cut their global CEO 00:48:49.001 --> 00:48:54.001 and their US CEO both got fired the new CEO at penguin random house revealed in 00:48:54.001 --> 00:49:00.001 an interview that he's like all in for AI insofar as it can help rationalize make 00:49:00.001 --> 00:49:07.000 more efficient the work that they do at the house. So yeah you know I mean I 00:49:07.000 --> 00:49:13.001 think these big five conglomerates their CEOs their job is find whatever 00:49:13.001 --> 00:49:19.001 mechanisms you can when you're in a business of books of culture that is not in 00:49:19.001 --> 00:49:24.001 and of itself designed to constantly grow every quarter then you got to get 00:49:24.001 --> 00:49:29.001 creative and always think about where am I going to find that little edge and AI 00:49:29.001 --> 00:49:34.001 is right now the place that everyone in C-suites across America are looking to 00:49:34.001 --> 00:49:41.000 find that edge and heads of the big five are no different. So 00:49:41.000 --> 00:49:44.001 another one that hadn't occurred to me at all reading the book but I think is 00:49:44.001 --> 00:49:50.001 really interesting is whether you have an opinion on the relative disinterest I 00:49:50.001 --> 00:49:56.000 guess particularly among the the large conglomerates in short fiction given you 00:49:56.000 --> 00:50:00.001 know in other areas of entertainment media short formats are amongst the most 00:50:00.001 --> 00:50:05.000 popular and I think becoming even more popular now. Yeah that's a really 00:50:05.000 --> 00:50:10.000 interesting question um they're like on the one hand short stories have a 00:50:10.000 --> 00:50:15.000 terrible reputation um books of short stories like there's you know I would look 00:50:15.000 --> 00:50:20.000 at memos and stuff from you know back in the 90s bring like you know whatever it 00:50:20.000 --> 00:50:24.000 is even if it's short stories just like slap the name novel on the top of it uh 00:50:24.000 --> 00:50:30.001 so that it will actually sell um and uh that's often the case people agents are 00:50:30.001 --> 00:50:34.001 often trying to work with writers to take how can they take their MFA short story 00:50:34.001 --> 00:50:41.001 collections and kind of mold it into something that looks like a novel for 00:50:41.001 --> 00:50:46.000 commercial reasons but the other piece of that is that novellas are having 00:50:46.000 --> 00:50:51.000 something like a a renaissance and and both in big trade publishing but it also 00:50:51.000 --> 00:50:55.000 you can see kind of everywhere also in academic publishing um there's there's 00:50:55.000 --> 00:51:01.000 this sort of fondness for fast short books uh books that are you know run 70 80 00:51:01.000 --> 00:51:07.001 pages maybe up to 110 pages um absolutely because of what Anna Kornbluh another 00:51:07.001 --> 00:51:12.001 critic calls in a recent book this desire for immediacy um this sense that they 00:51:12.001 --> 00:51:17.000 kind of a push uh she really worries that there's this there's this push towards 00:51:17.000 --> 00:51:23.001 simplification reduction immediate gratification um and that this is part of the 00:51:23.001 --> 00:51:30.001 motive behind um this desire for books in that kind of 70 to 110 page 00:51:30.001 --> 00:51:36.000 novella range um that for that reason might be seeing something like a like a 00:51:36.000 --> 00:51:42.001 moment that's really interesting um so another question we got 00:51:42.001 --> 00:51:48.001 um i'm thinking about uh sort of the attention span issue that's kind of lurking 00:51:48.001 --> 00:51:53.000 i think around a lot of this with online platforms and just how we consume media 00:51:53.000 --> 00:51:58.000 more generally there's a question about um what kind of going beyond the book i 00:51:58.000 --> 00:52:04.000 guess uh the effect of the rise of digital platforms as kind of the dominant 00:52:04.000 --> 00:52:10.000 means of uh distribution and kind of along with that some of these other sort of 00:52:10.000 --> 00:52:16.001 leverage buyout companies that have dominated the space like overdrive um and uh 00:52:16.001 --> 00:52:22.001 what is our effect on what's being written now yeah that is a really good 00:52:22.001 --> 00:52:29.000 question um there was a good piece a few years ago by 00:52:29.000 --> 00:52:35.001 nick levy i think in journal post 45 um thinking about how you know if you're 00:52:35.001 --> 00:52:41.000 able to write on a platform suddenly it makes the idea of seriality make a lot 00:52:41.000 --> 00:52:48.000 more sense um you're so in some ways what we're seeing is a return to the kind 00:52:48.000 --> 00:52:52.001 of 19th century like the triple decker 19th century victorian novel that was the 00:52:52.001 --> 00:52:57.001 compilation of charles dickens writing monthly like segments over and over and 00:52:57.001 --> 00:53:01.000 over again if you're writing for something like wattpad or if you're writing on 00:53:01.000 --> 00:53:07.001 kdp it can make a lot more business sense or just aesthetic sense formal sense um 00:53:07.001 --> 00:53:13.001 to write in installations rather than to just like envision one like you know 00:53:13.001 --> 00:53:19.000 kind of enclosed volume where the story begins and ends so that's what i see as 00:53:19.000 --> 00:53:26.000 maybe the most obvious like aesthetic formal shift that is like occurs when 00:53:26.000 --> 00:53:33.000 you kind of break the technology of the book onto the digital platform awesome 00:53:33.000 --> 00:53:37.001 um ted ted jump in if you've got your own thoughts about any of this 00:53:37.001 --> 00:53:44.001 nope i'm going to let you take it so i think i 00:53:44.001 --> 00:53:48.001 mentioned last time we talked uh one of my favorite parts of the book was this 00:53:50.000 --> 00:53:57.000 extensive glossary of publishing figures that you include um and so this is sort 00:53:57.000 --> 00:54:02.001 of a fun question but you have a lot of kind of crazy characters uh that are 00:54:02.001 --> 00:54:08.000 highlighted throughout the book um who was the most interesting to you oh man 00:54:08.000 --> 00:54:14.001 it's such a hard question uh but i was really delighted to find this guy 00:54:14.001 --> 00:54:21.001 named jim sitter so he's someone who he's not a name people know and i found him 00:54:21.001 --> 00:54:26.000 in a really weird way i was doing an event at washington university in st louis 00:54:26.000 --> 00:54:29.001 professor there put me in touch with one of their students who was doing an 00:54:29.001 --> 00:54:35.000 undergrad thesis on gentrification and non-profit publishers in minneapolis and 00:54:35.000 --> 00:54:38.001 she had been talking to this guy she's like you should talk to this guy here's an 00:54:38.001 --> 00:54:43.001 email his name's jim sitter um i got in touch with this guy he's in minnesota he 00:54:43.001 --> 00:54:50.001 was the architect of non-profit publishing in the united states like he was 00:54:50.001 --> 00:54:55.000 the one he pulled gray wolf press to the twin cities from washington state he 00:54:55.000 --> 00:54:59.001 pulled coffee house press which had been called toothpaste up from iowa city um 00:54:59.001 --> 00:55:04.001 and he was their sort of consultant who worked with them in milkweed editions um 00:55:04.001 --> 00:55:09.000 to figure out what it would look like to become non-profits he was strategizing 00:55:09.000 --> 00:55:13.000 at dinners with tony morrison and the head of the walker art center then when 00:55:13.000 --> 00:55:19.000 they were both on the national endowment for arts kind of council um and this guy 00:55:19.000 --> 00:55:23.000 eventually went to new york city and like got these massive grants to allow it to 00:55:23.000 --> 00:55:28.000 become a nationwide movement and now the guy's like you know he he's he's he's 00:55:28.000 --> 00:55:31.001 not working in that business anymore he's still hanging out in minneapolis and 00:55:31.001 --> 00:55:35.001 he's sitting he's got an incredible mind and he's a talker and he's just like got 00:55:35.001 --> 00:55:38.001 all these stories and so i got in touch with him we just did interview after 00:55:38.001 --> 00:55:43.001 interview where he would tell me in incredible detail these stories about running 00:55:43.001 --> 00:55:47.000 into alan cornbloom the founder of coffee house press and how they first met and 00:55:47.000 --> 00:55:51.000 what that exchange was like and what alan cornbloom was like in his you know 00:55:51.000 --> 00:55:57.000 garage working on a platen press doing letter press uh in the middle of the night 00:55:57.000 --> 00:56:01.001 listening to baseball so you know i just got endless stories out of gym sitter 00:56:01.001 --> 00:56:04.001 and after the book was done and it was about to get published i went up to 00:56:04.001 --> 00:56:10.000 minnesota to meet him in person and he took to me into this like old school um 00:56:10.000 --> 00:56:14.000 the monte carlo in the warehouse district in minnesota everyone knew him there 00:56:14.000 --> 00:56:18.000 and we got this little room and he brought this kind of lost and found uh that 00:56:18.000 --> 00:56:21.000 kind of show and tell of all these documents he'd had from over the years and 00:56:21.000 --> 00:56:25.001 spread them out over a couple tables while we're having martinis and at two in 00:56:25.001 --> 00:56:32.000 the afternoon so it was it was incredible that does sound like a fun one um well 00:56:32.000 --> 00:56:36.001 and i guess my my comment on that as i was reading the book was thinking like how 00:56:36.001 --> 00:56:40.001 much do we lose from having such levels of consolidation where like the 00:56:40.001 --> 00:56:47.001 individual personality role it is um in some ways uh diminished compared to 00:56:47.001 --> 00:56:54.000 uh publishing as it was i mean i read a just like someone's sub-stack post a 00:56:54.000 --> 00:56:57.001 couple days ago saying you know a report from someone in the in the industry who 00:56:57.001 --> 00:57:01.000 said you know when i was acquiring one debut book it needed to be read at a at a 00:57:01.000 --> 00:57:07.000 conglomerate house it needed to be read by 16 people before we could acquire it 00:57:07.000 --> 00:57:12.001 and if you need 16 people to look at a book and agree to acquire it um you know 00:57:12.001 --> 00:57:19.001 you're going to reduce the risk to a sort of institutional common sense um and it 00:57:19.001 --> 00:57:25.000 might be an exact like an extreme case but nevertheless you know the kind of 00:57:25.000 --> 00:57:28.001 aesthetic risk you can take at a conglomerate public house is reduced by any 00:57:28.001 --> 00:57:33.000 number of sort of built-in mechanisms um to kind of increase predictability and 00:57:33.000 --> 00:57:38.001 profit and decrease risk yeah no i mean it makes sense they're trying to operate 00:57:38.001 --> 00:57:45.001 a big business um so um so chris is turn his video on which 00:57:45.001 --> 00:57:49.001 means that we need to stop talking because he's going to wrap us up here in a 00:57:49.001 --> 00:57:53.000 minute um but thank you both this this was such an incredible talk i really 00:57:53.000 --> 00:57:58.000 appreciate you doing this and i appreciate everyone uh joining the talk so chris 00:57:58.000 --> 00:58:03.001 over to you thanks dave yeah listen here's the good news we could go for another 00:58:03.001 --> 00:58:08.001 hour with the crowd that we've held here and and would love to do so but in the 00:58:08.001 --> 00:58:13.001 in the fairness to everyone and of course uh dan and ted in fairness to you at 00:58:13.001 --> 00:58:17.001 your time we will bring this particular conversation to a close and you know 00:58:17.001 --> 00:58:22.000 maybe we'll come back together for a part two or another conversation because i 00:58:22.000 --> 00:58:26.000 think there's a lot more that we can explore in this book we've really just 00:58:26.000 --> 00:58:30.001 scratched the surface of the that deep dive that dave mentioned uh dan that you 00:58:30.001 --> 00:58:36.000 took in your research again um so i thank you uh to you dan uh for uh for the 00:58:36.000 --> 00:58:39.001 book and to ted for facilitating the conversation if you haven't picked up your 00:58:39.001 --> 00:58:46.000 copy of big fiction uh please grab it today um duncan shared a link out in the 00:58:46.000 --> 00:58:49.000 chat we'd love to have uh i'd love to see you pick up the book either you know 00:58:49.000 --> 00:58:55.001 from the uh from the book uh from the the booksmith our local uh san francisco uh 00:58:55.001 --> 00:58:58.001 bookseller or of course your own preferred local bookstore 00:59:04.001 --> 00:59:10.000 sorry uh muted there um as uh as we wind down here today the um i want to tell 00:59:10.000 --> 00:59:14.000 you about a couple of events that uh that i think you're going to want to attend 00:59:14.000 --> 00:59:19.000 so on may 17th dave and his colleagues will be hosting uh an in-person 00:59:19.000 --> 00:59:22.001 celebration at the internet archive for the 10th anniversary of author's alliance 00:59:22.001 --> 00:59:26.000 and as dave mentioned at the top it's a really important organization please 00:59:26.000 --> 00:59:30.000 check into it sign up uh become a member if you aren't already and if you're in 00:59:30.000 --> 00:59:35.001 the bay area on the 17th please do come uh for our 10-year celebration of 00:59:35.001 --> 00:59:40.001 author's alliance um our uh the program features a keynote from sci-fi author and 00:59:40.001 --> 00:59:44.001 journalist cori doctorow who is a particular favorite of mine and was also uh 00:59:44.001 --> 00:59:51.001 mentioned uh earlier on in the conversation our next event then uh is uh is an 00:59:51.001 --> 00:59:54.001 interesting one it's not hosted by the internet archive but i think it will be of 00:59:54.001 --> 00:59:58.001 interest to this audience so i wanted to share it here um this is uh communion is 00:59:58.001 --> 01:00:03.001 an international association incorporated under belgian law that advocates for 01:00:03.001 --> 01:00:08.001 policies that expand the public domain and increase access to and reuse a reuse 01:00:08.001 --> 01:00:14.000 of culture and knowledge and they're hosting a conversation the right to e-lend 01:00:14.000 --> 01:00:18.001 and having a conversation across the eu and across their consortium of what does 01:00:18.001 --> 01:00:23.000 it mean um uh to lend books digitally so you know libraries have long played a 01:00:23.000 --> 01:00:27.000 crucial role in ensuring broad public access to knowledge and to culture yet 01:00:27.000 --> 01:00:31.000 libraries can't lend out digital books today under the same conditions as 01:00:31.000 --> 01:00:35.000 physical books so this conversation is meant to bring together and ask the 01:00:35.000 --> 01:00:39.000 questions of what are the specific legal barriers that are stifling libraries in 01:00:39.000 --> 01:00:44.000 the digital environment and how do we overcome them that is on um wednesday may 01:00:44.000 --> 01:00:50.001 29th it's at 1500 cet or 9 a. m uh eastern time which i know may be early 01:00:50.001 --> 01:00:55.000 for some of our west coast audience but there is a recording available so please 01:00:55.000 --> 01:00:59.001 register for that if you're interested in participating and then you can listen 01:00:59.001 --> 01:01:04.001 in if you're not able to join synchronously so to close down here i'd like to 01:01:04.001 --> 01:01:09.000 wrap as we always do with commitments and thank yous as we said a couple of times 01:01:09.000 --> 01:01:12.001 but it bears repeating today's session was recorded and the links will be shared 01:01:12.001 --> 01:01:18.000 out and archived on archive.org tonight and shared with you and all registrants 01:01:18.000 --> 01:01:22.001 in an email tomorrow and for thank yous again a thank you to dan and ted for such 01:01:22.001 --> 01:01:27.001 a great conversation uh today to dave hansen and author's alliance for co-hosting 01:01:27.001 --> 01:01:32.001 the session and to you our audience for uh for your time and your enthusiasm and 01:01:32.001 --> 01:01:37.001 the great questions uh that we had today we've shared out uh final links in chat 01:01:37.001 --> 01:01:42.000 if you want to re-watch any of our book talks or if you missed some um uh over 01:01:42.000 --> 01:01:45.000 the past three almost four years now that we've been doing the series they're all 01:01:45.000 --> 01:01:50.000 preserved and available for viewing on archive. org and we also have another event 01:01:50.000 --> 01:01:55.000 that unfortunately we weren't able to schedule um and get into our uh our list 01:01:55.000 --> 01:02:00.001 here but there is another really good book talk coming up um looking at june 6th 01:02:00.001 --> 01:02:04.000 as the date so the best way to stay up to date on what's happening at the 01:02:04.000 --> 01:02:08.001 internet archive is by our blog or our calendar of events which has been uh which 01:02:08.001 --> 01:02:13.001 duncan has shared out uh into the chat and always on our social media we're 01:02:13.001 --> 01:02:20.000 active on every platform at varying levels of uh frequency so uh to sign off here 01:02:20.000 --> 01:02:24.001 a big thank you again to everyone and i hope that you can join us at one of our 01:02:24.001 --> 01:02:28.001 upcoming events thank you all everyone have a great day